MilkySway
Introduction
This is a milky glass outdoor lamp that i transformed into a LED colour lamp many years ago.
This was the first colour LED lamp that i made with PWM controlled colour fading patterns.
The lamp can be remote controlled by a Philips RC5 infrared remote control that is used to switch the lamp on and off and to select one of 9 colour patterns.
When the lamp is switched on with the remote control, it automatically selects pattern1, which is a slow colour changing pattern.
The circuit is based on 2 microcontrollers.
A Microchip PIC12F508 to receive and process the IR remote control signals. The remote control command is passed to second microcontroller, a PIC16F628, that controls the red, green and blue LEDs that
are assembled on a prototyping PCB. Of course all the functionality could be easily done with 1 microcontroller, but for the project i just connected together 2 individual projects that i had prepared.
I used big high efficiency red, green and blue LEDs from an old LED-spotlight. The LEDs had lenses to focus the light into a cone, but i have cut off the lens part of the LED because instead of focussing, i needed diffusing light.
To diffuse the light i sanded the LED body with very fine sandpaper. This gives a nice diffusing effect, so you don't see the individual LED's shining through the milky glass of the lamp glass cover.
Pictures
